This is the website for APPC, the Academic Program Prioritization Ad Hoc Committee of the Faculty Senate at Portland State University for the 2014-15 Academic Year.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

APP at Other Institutions

There have been Academic Program Prioritization efforts at numerous colleges and universities across the continent. Those of us involved in APP at PSU can certainly learn a lot by looking at how those other institutions have conducted their processes.

In some cases, there are good ideas, tools, and strategies that we can adapt to meet our needs here. It's hardly surprising, but one of the most commonly shared features of a successful APP process is a commitment to communicate with and engage the campus community.

Of course, there are also opportunities to learn from experiences on campuses where APP did not work well, resulting, for example: from a lack of transparency or of faculty involvement; from a failure to set reasonable expectations; or from the use of a priori assumptions about what the results of APP should be. By observing the pitfalls elsewhere, we can attempt to avoid running in to the same issues here.

The following list identifies some of the organizations that we have surveyed to learn about how APP efforts have worked elsewhere. (Items in bold were also considered by the previous ad hoc committee in developing their report and recommendations for PSU.)

Where possible, we have included links to websites with more information. The APPC also maintains a larger repository of documents from other institutions; we do not feel at liberty to distribute these directly on the web, but are happy to provide more details to colleagues at PSU. In addition, of course, we welcome any additional pointers to documentation about APP efforts at other institutions, including notifications about dead or missing links in the above list.